Is your marriage what you want it to be? Has your spouse left you emotionally? Have you tried to solve problems like these and found you could not do it alone? This need has given rise to the Jesuit Institute for Family Life: a staff of competently prepared and professionally skilled counselors and therapist whose training and interest is in dealing with these questions and areas of growth in family living. The Jesuit Institute for Family Life is a response, then, to a need within families to value the presence of individual members and the quality of intra-family relationships. To want to value one’s spouse and family members is often quite different from actually performing, in a way that effectually expresses such value. We find that new skills are often needed and old obstacles to growth must be understood and worked through before effective human relating can be realized. As a staff our experience shows that talking out one’s inner feelings within the counseling process is necessary and an effective way to deal with many personal and interpersonal process of counseling to be a normal way to modern world brings to bear on contemporary family life. Our staff is a professional team resource. We meet for case consultations providing a stimulating professional milieu and call upon other professionals in the fields of psychiatry, family law, moral and ethical questions, clinical psychology, and spirituality for frequent consultations. This provides a community of interested experts working together to serve the family as such a task warrants and demands. The staff is made up of competent counselors and therapists who are Catholic in religious orientation perceiving marriage as a sacrament. We perceive that in relating to one another we relate to Christ as He said, “If you give to these brothers and sisters of mine you give to Me.” This means that every stride an individual makes in therapy to be themselves and share themselves is a movement toward God...a raising one’s heart and mind...one’s self...to God. It is our opinion, then, that this counseling process is a movement toward God and as such functions as an extension of the ascetical practice of examination of consciousness. We as staff members consider this to be the context, the underpinnings, and the ambiance of the therapeutic work we do. We serve a wide range of age groups, races, and socio-economic and educational backgrounds reflecting the rich variety of families in the Bay Area.